How Our April Fools Joke Fooled the Internet

On April Fools Day we posted an article about James Cameron wanting to direct a sequel to Ridley Scott's "Prometheus," just like he directed a sequel to "Alien." Since then we've been bombarded with emails asking if the article is a joke or not. So now I'm posting a clarification. IT'S A JOKE. All the quotes were made up. Cameron never said any of those things.

The reason why so many are interested in this is because The Guardian picked up on this story and treated it as fact. All the paper had to do was click on the "Source" link in our original article to see that it's an April Fools joke. But they didn't and it just got worse.

Soon after, Deadline posted their own article based on The Guardian article and other sites followed. It would have been wise to check the source, especially on April Fools, but I don't blame The Guardian. After all, we did our best to make the article sound legitimate, even though most people understand that Cameron will never direct a sequel to anyone's work except his own.

The problem is with Deadline. Not that it picked up the article from The Guardian, but because it said that the source is The Guardian, not WP. After most sites realizes it was a joke, they simply apologized. But not Deadline. It instead erased all user comments about how the original article was a joke and then posted an update that states:

"Insiders tell me that James Cameron was making a slightly humorous off handed comment about making a Prometheus sequel and they'd be surprised if it amounted to anything, considering how busy the director will be preoccupied with Avatar sequels."

I can tell you that Cameron never said any of those things. So what is Deadline talking about?

The entire thing ended up embarrassing several people and a few very prestigious news outlets that I personally trust and am a fan of. For that I apologize, but maybe this will force some journalists to do a bit more digging before posting something as fact. In the end, we can be proud of creating what FilmSchoolRejects called: "By far the most damaging false story of all."

@TT To be fair mate I am suprised they didn't hack Alex's phone to find out this was fake. Remember Piers "The Bellend" Morgan's expose of the British troops beating up Iraqi soldiers?
Well done Alex on this one, another rule to life by, along with "Always work from a saved doc*ment", "Always check the source"

That's literally the lamest April fools joke ever. If you would have said James Cameron had died or that Uwe Boll was directing the Prometheus sequel that would have got me worried. I thought the article wasn't clear about whether Cameron was doing it any way so I wasn't really fussed.